Deeplinks Blog posts about EFF Europe

Charlie McCreevy, the EU's Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services, wants to nearly double the European copyright term in sound recordings - from 50 years to an astounding 95. Join us and stop overextending copyright.

If you read Commissioner McCreevy's declaration this month to bring American-style copyright terms for sound recordings to the EU, one might have thought that it was all a done deal. He gave the impression that he had consulted with everybody who counted in the matter, balanced all the arguments, and had all the powerful players on his side.

The German Constitutional Court (the Bundesverfassungsgericht) ruled today on a what the German press is calling "a new basic right" - one that guarantees the confidentiality and integrity of computer systems.

The court spelled out the protection as part of its judgement (available in German) on the constitutionality of a law that let police infiltrate a suspect's computer by using trojan horses or rootkits. Such police powers had been repeatedly called for by the Federal Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, as well as the head of the German Federal Police.

We've long been concerned about the human rights risks of printer tracking dots for anyone who publishes printed works with modern technology. Tracking dots are the secret marks that many popular color laser printers and photocopiers scatter across every document they touch. The marks, almost invisible to the eye, uniquely identify the printer that produced the document, and, as EFF uncovered, can even automatically encode the time and date it was created.

Anonymous self-publication and distribution have been, and remain, a vital political communication channel in many countries. A telltale pattern readable by government officials is a tool that oppressive states everywhere would love to have -- not to mention the general threat to individual privacy countries more respectful of human rights.

It's been almost a year since EFF opened an office in Brussels and focused our attention on political lobbying in the heart of the European Union. In that time, we've learned a great deal about how policies become EC law and how decisions get made in the EU.

Can a rightsholder force an ISP to hand over a subscriber's identity in a civil copyright infringement lawsuit? In the U.S., the answer is a clear yes - as evidenced by the music industry's more than 20,000 lawsuits against alleged individual filesharers. In Spain (and perhaps other EU countries) the answer is no, at least for now.